AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF STRESS VARIATION IN RUSSIAN PAST TENSE VERBAL FORMS

 This paper discusses stress variation in Russian past tense verbal forms. It is generally assumed that it instantiates inter-speaker variation governed by sociolinguistic factors. However, there is also substantial intra-speaker variation. We claim that it is partially constrained by the rhythm of the context in which the given form with variable stress occurs. In order to test this claim, we ran an experiment that showed a clear preference for alternating rhythm in a sequence of a past tense verb and its direct object. We regard this pattern to be a case of the more general rhythmic rule active in Modern Standard Russian.